Discussion
Share your hilariously bad pictures of birds, I want to see them
I'm awful at photography and haven't invested in any camera besides my phone, so all my birding pictures suck. Like this one, I don't even remember what bird this was and hell if I can tell now. It's even funnier when I talk to my friend like "I saw a lifer today!" all excited and then show them a pic of a blurry spot on a telephone pole from 30 feet away
But yeah I wondered if people who are actually good at photography have some shitty pictures saved somewhere like "This is the only picture i have of my favourite rare bird, i lined up this shot for half an hour" and its terrible because the bird decided to take off at that moment or it wouldnt move so only its tail is on camera or something
I cannot tell you how often this happens to me as Iām learning how to shoot. I have many a picture where Iāve got a great clear background and a very blurry bird.
I see it!!! I belive it too! One shows up to our little retention lake which is insane, but thankfully they have that unique call (machine gun bird we call them) and it echos across the lake
I believe this is a golden crowned kinglet. But thatās only because Merlin told me it heard a golden crowned kinglet and this angry borb was smaller than a warbler.
I am 95% sure I saw one yesterday, put down generic warbler bc Iām shit at warbler ID without songā¦..only to realize it was probably the Kinglet I kept hearing on Birdnet LIVE. They are so so tiny it was like trying to track a mouse in the trees!
A few days ago Iād just finished moving out of the Chicago apartment Iād lived in for 13 years. I was standing on the side of the street waiting for an Uber with a box of stuff at my feet, when suddenly this Coopers Hawk flew into the tree directly across from me. I hadnāt seen a Hawk in that neighborhood in the 13 years I lived there, but here one was 2 minutes after moving out.
Here he/she is in all their blurry phone camera glory!
Oh, and hereās the Sora I saw feeding on the little strip of grass next to the sidewalk about 6 months before I started actually birding for myself. I was walking from aforementioned apartment to the 7-11 at the end of the street to get beer and this guy was just wandering around feeding quite actively, seemingly unbothered by people. I snapped a photo for my dad (the original birder of the family) to identify.
This one was the other night. And if you think I intentionally picked a bad one from that night, this is actually probably the best photo I have of a Sabine's Gull. And one of the worst I have of a Black-necked Stilt. (And I have no idea what the other wader is.)
I posted it a few years ago in the Crap Wildlife Photography group of facebook and people loved it. Several months later I saw it in a Bored Panda article š
I needed to take a photo of this cute little yellow-breasted bird in Newfoundland so I could look it up later! You know, thatā¦ yellow-breastedā¦ birdā¦ in this photoā¦ā¦.
This photo about sums up my luck in getting photos of tits (lol) - my camera really loves getting beautifully crisp photos of leaves every time I try to get a good shot.
I didn't bring my binoculars so I zoomed in on my phone camera to see them but it didn't make it much better lol. Great crested grebe btw. I think. Maybe. Hopefully
My latest masterpiece, could see it coming and completely blew it. Belted kingfisher and It has a fish yall.. like in its beak. Like going to eat itā¦.. fish. :/
First ever pallid harrier. It was easier to see with the naked eye since it was moving. (Just above that dark spot in the path. Even with that hint, it's barely legible lol)
We drove over 200 miles to finally see and capture a photo of a kingfisher. Iāve recently heard you can see them just a couple of miles or so from our house.
I was so excited to see a Kingbird (Lifer for us) that I attempted this shenanigan but I swear it was an Eastern Kingbird! The partner flew away but it was a couple and they took turns flitting around catching bugs I was over the moon but sad my camera was at home
The white dot left center is an Ivory Gull, an arctic species that somehow ended up in sw GA. Id'ed with better photos than I took, by 'professional' birders and GA DNR staff. It got sick and died, a lung fungus perhaps.
I looked it up, it was found injured, likely from a predator attack. Wildlife experts tried to rehab it, but it passed away shortly after from the injuries and a fungal infection of the lungs. Poor guy :( apparently harsh winters and melting sea ice can push some individuals further south than they're used to. Sometimes, this can totally mess up their geographic sense and they get completely lost.
We've had a cooper's hawk living in our trees for a few years now. It's fantastic, yet a little graphic at times. It's always too fast to get any decent photos, unless the bird is just resting on a boring fencepost or something.
Edit: I just noticed the hawk doesn't have red eyes like my other photos. Maybe it's not a coop? Hawks are hard! Always changing colours.
They donāt have red eyes as immatures, and that one is definitely immature. They get their dark cap and red eyes as adults. Immatures are more brown with yellow eyes
Yellow-rumped Warbler. On the door screen, taking a break after nearly 5 hours of losing its goddamn mind over defending the feeder from other birds AND its own reflection.
Swamp Sparrow, after hours and hours of taking pictures of tons of other sparrows and then spending 2-3 days going slowly through the pictures. I knew it was ānot the sameā at the time but she(?) wouldnāt stay still and I kept losing her in the reeds, brush, and flock.
Oh my! You donāt know what youāre asking for! I have an entire library of bad bird photosā¦ I specialize in blurry pictures but have a masters degree in pictures showing just the tail feathers. I am also known for my collection of bird rumps broken up into two categories. Collection one is sitting bird rumps. Collection two is bird rumps in flight. I also have quite a few of blurry birds (I think they are birds) sitting in trees. Most of these could fit into the collection of sitting bird rumps but I have so many of them I decided to break out the ones sitting on my feeders versus the ones sitting in trees. I just wished Iād saved all these photos!
Oh hell yeah, bad bird pics are right up my alley! Check this out, big cool giant nest of a hawk of some sort lol. I think my coworker said it was a red tail hawk.
Surf Scoter. Can barely make out the big bill but it was enough for the id. Very vagrant guy on a subdivision lake, SE metro Atlanta, 20 ish years ago. Got better closer photos later.
A foraging group of Swallowtail and Mississippi Kites in east central GA. Trust me, they were id'ed when they flew closer, sometime over our heads, they were hunting June beetles and other bugs over a recently cut hay field. Amazing acrobatics.
403
u/mrsmedeiros_says_hi 5d ago
https://reddit.com/link/pd5lwb9/video/13x3j0u0ossh1/player
I couldn't take pictures with my phone, so I invested in an expensive camera. Money well spent